What's better than Pleco and Anki these days?

These two were my go-to back before we even called them apps. I paid for Pleco  on my Windows   phone(wow) and have transferred licenses from phone to phone ever since. 

I got the Outlier dictionary paid add-on which is still gold. It takes you all the way to oracle bones for some entries (I don't know if they ever finished it).   Simplified version for CSL, not the expert  version for scholars. 

Pleco is  just a dictionary and I don't even know if people use dictionaries any more.  It seems the few new foreigners just use Google Translate for everything and consider learning Chinese a waste of valuable time. 

What about flashcards?  I tried Anki after a long gap of not learning and it was a disappointing throwback in all respects.  They still expect you to learn XML and all their weird concepts so you can create your own cards.  I just want flashcards for character memorization. 

I asked on the Anki forums and apparently they moved away from Asian language  learning long ago. Now it's for doctors and people who work on nuclear submarines. Someone piped up and said, yes, he had heard the app had its roots in language learning and didn't know why it had a Japanese name. 

Anki was originally developed as a flashcard replacement for Japanese learners using the then-new spaced repetition algorithm  which replaced the old "different stacks of paper flashcards" method. From there it was a short road to Chinese, and I used to use it extensively back in 2011 or so. 

I'm getting back into learning again and want to start drilling characters.

But Anki is just out of date. I'm not constructing my own cards in XML. 

What's new these days?   There has to have been substantial development in CSL apps in  almost two decades.

Not Duolingo, I tried it  and it sucked, learning Chinese isn't about translating sentences into English and being scored wrong if a word is out of order. 

Pleco has a flashcard function but I never liked it.

maybe not an answer to your question, just a comment. I've been dabbling into Japanese recently, and there isn't a Pleco equivalent which is half as good (the closest I found is JPDB). You need different apps for dictionary and kanji lookup, and they just don't work as well (i.e. you don't always find what you are looking for, you can't easily find same words with same characters etc).

Really made me realize how lucky we are with Pleco, to have a dictionary with a great user interface, which doubles as flashcards, reader etc. at a very affordable price. 

I recommend using it for flashcards because they're one-click setup (so can add on the fly while you are reading something) - zero effort, and when I nuke the deck I have no regrets.  

On 1/10/2026 at 11:32 PM, matteo said:

I recommend using it for flashcards because they're one-click setup (so can add on the fly while you are reading something) - zero effort, and when I nuke the deck I have no regrets.  

I used it and liked it also. Didn't take as much "construction effort" as Anki. I no longer study Chinese, so I'm not sure if it has been "replaced" as a popular app. Might help to ask on a more active forum. 

I suppose I count as an anki 'power user', having used it consistently for about 12 years now. I agree with everything you've said, I try to recommend it to new students but I think only about 1 in 20 actually do use it as intended, the 'set up' is such a massive barrier to most they just go back to quizlet or similar, and who can blame them. In fact, I see quite a few students curating big physical decks of flashcards these days, apparently because they like flashcard learning and see the benefits, but anki is just too difficult...!

While I personally would use XML, I really don't think you need that to make Anki cards anymore - it's all GUI, I've never had to deal with XML to write my cards. You create card types and fill in the fields in the GUI when creating them one by one.

I'll share a method for batch creation also, but this is extra. You can use Chinese Text Analyzer to load a text, flag words you don't know, and export CSV files which in turn can imported into Anki to create cards. CTA tracks which characters you have marked known, and you can export unknown characters from the text along with definitions and example sentence. Obviously flagging all the words you know seems very very difficult, so you can start by telling the program your HSK level. Also, when I have worked through a flash card deck quite a lot, i then take that list of words and mark it all as "known".

Anyway, obviously, I am still using Anki. And I use Pleco all the time too. Unfortunately, it may be years until I come visit China. When I do, I hope to be competent in the language. I am going to take my HSK5 exam later this month here in BC, Canada.

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I asked on the Anki forums and apparently they moved away from Asian language  learning long ago.

This may be, but I see no way in which the program is no longer suitable for our purpose. Anki rules! As another aside, I pay a bit for credits on an addon for Anki which basically acts as a middleman for various voice generation APIs (best voices seem to be Azure Neural), and I add voice clips to all my cards.

On 1/11/2026 at 12:10 PM, vellocet said:

Pleco is  just a dictionary and I don't even know if people use dictionaries any more

I still use Pleco daily, it is easily the most important Chinese learning tool for me. I am also enrolled in the beta for Pleco 4.0, but I quickly moved back to the official public release because a lot of my daily Pleco workflow was made much harder with the new UI in the 4.0 beta, hopefully it is improved before the official release.

On 1/11/2026 at 12:10 PM, vellocet said:

What's new these days?   There has to have been substantial development in CSL apps in  almost two decades.

Hack Chinese is probably the new "cool kid" on the block. I loved it at first, but eventually found a lot of issues and stopped using it.

On 5/27/2025 at 10:39 AM, Elliott Jones said:

I do not use Hack Chinese anymore. I did use it for a few weeks in 2024, and initially I loved its progress tracking, for example it was nice to mark certain TOCFL levels as learnt, so that when I added other vocab lists, it excluded all the words I already knew. Unfortunately, I found multiple issues with the platform as it was in 2024:

 

1. Example sentences were sometimes strange

2. Example sentences were not always in Traditional Chinese (despite me using the platform in Traditional Chinese mode)

3. Dictionary search was quite bad (if I remember correctly you could not search in Traditional at that time)

4. Dictionary definitions were often not ordered from most common to least common

 

However, the real reason I didn't subscribe after the free trial is that, randomly adding new flashcards from a list is a terrible way to learn new vocabulary. What I was learning wasn't sticking and it was horribly tedious. What I do now, which works, is make my own flashcards in Anki. The process of researching the word on multiple dictionaries and looking for example sentences to add to the card, is in itself a great way to initially learn a new word, then the reviews just cement it into my mind.

 

I don't know if the 4 issues I mentioned above were fixed in the latest update, but I was quite disappointed with the "new features" announced, and they weren't enough to push me into giving the platform another chance. Hack Chinese needs to be more than just a nice flashcard system for it to be truly useful for me.

I still use Pleco and Anki.

For dictionary purposes, I also use Youdao (website, don't know if they have an app), and between Pleco and Youdao I can find most regular words. (For the more specific words I turn to Wikipedia and Google Image).

I've been using Anki inconsistently since 2010 or so. I make my own cards (Chinese to Dutch) and I'm not even sure what XML is, so clearly one doesn't need that to make cards. I'm sure I could make nicer, flashier, even three-sided cards if I did know what XML is and how to employ it, but as it is I make two-sided cards individually by hand and they serve me well. I wanted to learn katakana last year and there was a ready-made deck I could download.

But if there is something better and more useful out there, I'd love to hear it.

I’m also still using both Anki and Pleco, but these days I rely more on Claude (than Pleco) to create example sentences I use in Anki Cloze cards. 

I have never really used them even though I bought Pleco early on. Mostly because Pleco still does not support Windows Desktop. 

Today, for me, AI has become indispensable.

In terms of free tools I would vote for Language Reactor. I use it daily and would probably cry if it disappeared.

Lingq is great and has really taken off since it first came onto the scene. It supports AI, YT, Prime, Netflix import, etc. But it it costs money. 

Interestingly I was talking to a colleague who studied Chinese as an option at university about 25 years ago (and did not continue after graduation), I thought it was interesting that he said 'i found Chinese incredibly difficult, then this program called Wenlin came out and we all realised we didnt need to learn Chinese, the computer would do it for us!' I wondered what he would think of pleco, anki and now ai tools, but the conversation got cut short.

I still use Wenlin every single day, it requires a 'bit' of UI tweaking, but it is unbelievably useful for reading technical articles or historical literature where you are at about 95% comprehension and need a dictionary on hand for those obscure words.

On 1/12/2026 at 7:36 PM, Tomsima said:

I still use Wenlin every single day, it requires a 'bit' of UI tweaking, but it is unbelievably useful for reading technical articles or historical literature where you are at about 95% comprehension and need a dictionary on hand for those obscure words.

Me too; pretty much always stick a text I'm translating into Wenlin, nice clean interface and you can look up those obscure words you mention. Pleco I also use a fair amount, though our most regular user is probably my daughter, who uses it to check the characters she didn't know from her previous night's homework as we do the school run.

For drilling characters specifically, Skritter is worth looking at — it focuses on stroke order and writing rather than passive recognition, which makes a real difference in what sticks. The subscription isn't cheap but it's the most purpose-built thing I've come across for exactly that use case.

Still using Anki. If you want to get fancy you can use html/css/javascript; however you do not have to. I am not a fan of monthly payments for learning apps, so for my usecase I can't recommend skritter and co. There is an anki deck that pretty much does everything skritter does for free if you don't mind tinkering a little. (https://www.skishore.me/makemeahanzi/)

I use ChatGPT for most of my language learning now. I barely use dictionaries any more. If I want to know what a word means, I ask ChatGPT. It will usually provide a more comprehensive answer than most dictionaries, and will give examples in context with notes on nuance. It is great for understanding complex grammar also - just ask it to parse and explain a sentence, and it will break it up and explain each element for you. I'm using it principally for Japanese though. I have not actively been learning Chinese for over 10 years.

The XML barrier is basically a myth at this point. Just search AnkiWeb for a shared HSK deck, there are several well-maintained ones with audio, download it and you're reviewing within minutes without touching any settings. I was in the same boat after a long break and that was the path of least resistance back in.